People falling down is funny

... as long as nobody gets seriously hurt in the process of course. But in general, the image of someone slipping on a banana peel is considered humorous, and if you've ever watched one of those funny home video shows on tv, they seem to consist to ninety percent of pets and toddlers falling on their faces or adults running into doors. We love it when people are clumsy.

People falling down in a video game is even funnier, because it's a hundred percent risk free (nobody actually gets hurt), and you can fall down in new and imaginative ways that wouldn't even be possible in real life. Every WoW player could probably tell you at least one story of how they died from fall damage in some surprising and absolutely hilarious way; personally I could probably fill an entire blog post with them.

Now, the Star Wars universe has a long history of having extremely bad health and safety standards when it comes to preventing people from falling from dangerous heights. Where are the safety rails?! Randomly placed on slightly elevated decks, it seems... I was very pleased to see that The Old Republic stays true to its source material in this regard.

In the Esseles, I had my first accident by walking right off the walkway leading to the droid bonus boss. When we returned later, we had no less than two Jedi warriors die in the same area by force leaping through the floor. Admittedly this was slightly less funny since it was due to a bug and not mere clumsiness, but still.

Hammer Station presented us with the giant tunnel of doom that is crossed by a bridge which disappears and reappears on a timer. Again, I saw more than person fall victim to this unsafe contraption and fall to their deaths. Red is bad!

However, the highlight of hilarious accidents so far has been our guild's Cademimu run last night. Things started off well when our Vanguard accidentally autoran off a platform early on, but what really had us in awe was the elevator we encountered later in the instance. It's without a doubt the most nefarious example of its kind that I've ever seen. It slowly descends across four levels, with each of those levels containing nothing but a small, useless platform that doesn't lead anywhere. So obviously, our party's first mistake was to get off on the first platform because that's where the lift stopped. We then ran back and forth for a bit, looking for somewhere to go, until we realised that we had got ourselves stuck in a dead end. The lift, meanwhile, had continued its journey downwards without us.

We waited for it to come up again, and our Vanguard wanted to jump on it as it did so... except that we then discovered that, for no discernible reason, it goes upwards at about four times the speed at which it goes downwards, so our poor party member walked right under it as it soared past his head and fell to his death again. The whole group was in stitches, and I was actually shedding tears of laughter in front of my screen; it was just too silly.

The three of us continued down while the Vanguard ran back, and engaged the group of mobs at the bottom. "Make sure to actually step off the elevator," my significant other reminded me... and I did, but then I also took a step backwards again when I saw that I was getting too close to the mobs, and before I knew it I had fallen down, presumably underneath the lift that was now rising again. I couldn't really tell, all I knew was that I couldn't move and that lightning was crackling all around me until I died. Fortunately the other two managed to finish off the mob pack on their own with no problems. Mobs are easy. Lifts are hard.

We then had a couple of wipes on the last boss, and as it turns out, you have to use that devious elevator every time you run back in. Every. Time. Eventually it caught our Jedi Shadow off guard too, going down just as he tried to jump on it, and he went splat as it halted on the second or third level.

I'd really like to meet whoever designed that lift and ask them what they were thinking. Though I would also like to thank them for creating something extremely entertaining. I wonder how many more wonders like that are just waiting for us to fall off them?

The Elevator of Evil